


287. shattered sunbeams

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [274]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 05:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10506792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: All sorts of people come in and out of the art studio, and Helena watches each and every one.





	

**Author's Note:**

> ...and maybe has a noticeable bias for a few of them, because of who I am as a person

If Helena closes her eyes and opens them right, the art studio isn’t anything but a collection of different kinds of light. Blue, orange, pink – canvases everywhere, splattered and painted. Other people’s worlds, brought out of their eyeballs and out to where Helena can see them.

Helena doesn’t paint. Helena does charcoal sometimes, but it gets on her fingers, and she hates it. Mostly she just comes into the art studio to hide from everything that is _not_ the art studio; the art studio has the worst lock out of anything in any of the buildings, and either people don’t notice that she isn’t there or people don’t care. They all come in and out of the building at strange hours, and so does she, and none of them pay attention to one another. In their own way, they are all here for the light.

Helena’s been watching, though. Sometimes she tries to draw all the different artists on pieces of paper she finds in her pockets – receipts, napkins, candy wrappers – but they come out as awkward angles and nothing else so she stops trying and just: watches.

Girl-with-a-crush is painting all in gold again, which means the latest crush has blonde hair; she’s swaying to music Helena can’t hear, paint splattering all over her clothes.

Statue-girl is painting the same piece of fruit again, the same strokes as last time, mechanical; the apple still looks angry, has always looked angry, is always going to look angry. No paint on her clothes. No paint anywhere but the same place the paint has always been.

Girl-with-the-backpack is painting more bears. Helena likes her. They’re always good bears, round and brightly colored; girl-with-the-backpack hums to herself, but does not dance. All of her songs pace around and don’t settle. None of them are songs Helena knows, and she likes them, and she likes girl-with-the-backpack.

But girl-with-the-backpack isn’t Helena’s favorite. Alison isn’t even Helena’s favorite, even though one time she saw Helena in the corner and frowned at her and left her a pillow that Helena sits on now. Helena’s favorite is the girl who keeps painting the light.

Every canvas in the room swallows light, in its own way – light on hairs and bears and glossy red apples. But every night the girl whose name Helena doesn’t know skulks in, hood up, earbuds in, and: she paints the light. The way it looked outside that day. When it rains she paints in dark slashes of grey and smothered patches of black; on hot days she paints sunlight so white it prickles at Helena’s eyeballs. She doesn’t play music the way that girl-with-a-crush does, doesn’t hum like girl-with-the-backpack does. She doesn’t dance. She just rocks on the balls of her feet a little as she goes, like movement is flowing out of her and through the brush and onto the canvas where it will become light.

Helena tried to draw her once, but it was just a scribble. It feels right, the scribble, but it isn’t. Right. It’s not her. Helena doesn’t even know her name.

It’s at the point where Helena is only coming to the studio to see her, the girl, leather jacket and combat boots and stormcloud-feeling. When she paints she loosens. She looks more and more like the light she paints until the painting is done, and she’s a cloud again, and she’s putting up her hood, and she’s leaving. Lights out behind her. Helena in the dark, without any light at all.

Some nights she doesn’t come. Helena watches girl-with-a-crush, or statue-girl, or girl-with-the-backpack, or any of the others, but they aren’t the same. One time statue-girl is painting another apple and Helena stands up and leaves, partway through. She knows how the story is going to go.

(Statue-girl jumped, when Helena stood up from the corner, and slashed a big red slash across her apple-canvas. When Helena left that night statue-girl was staring at it, her red-slash-mouth a perfect mirror.)

But she comes back. Both of them come back, over and over, drawn to the same light.

Helena hasn’t even heard her speak. Maybe her voice would sound like the painting she made of summer, or maybe it would sound the sharp glass way light is in wintertime. Maybe she’s cruel, but – she painted dawn with such tenderness. She probably isn’t cruel. To paint the way she does, she has to spend so much time watching the sky. Helena’s taken to it, watching the sky, just to try and guess the way it’ll come out in paint. She never guesses right.

One night – not different from any other night, not really, except – Helena finds a crumpled-up sticky note in her pocket that says BUY MILK HELENA and flips it over, writes PRETTY. Stops. There are other words, probably, but Helena has never been good at words. She doesn’t know how to write it down: _you take the sky and own it and remake it in a way you understand, and I want to watch you do that for always_. So. She lets the Y trail off into nothing, and then she sticks the sticky note on the side of the last canvas. Then she goes and sits down in the corner, tucked away behind easels, invisible. Unless you’re looking

Hours pass. Helena eats Milk Duds (almost milk!) (almost) and tries to see if she can see apples in the thing statue-girl is painting now. If she squints, she thinks they’re there. Mostly it’s just anger and red. Helena likes it better.

The door bangs open and she’s there, the girl, hair everywhere, scowl on her face. Combat boots scuffed up. Hands-in-pockets. She looks around but there’s no one standing there, and so she makes a line straight for her canvas—

Sees the note. Rips it off the canvas, flips it over, peers at it. Helena watches her brow furrow; Helena feels the odd feeling of a stranger mouthing your name. Then Helena watches her mouth _pretty_. Her whole face is confusion and wariness, a stray cat seeing a saucer of milk and thinking that it must be poison. She shoves the note into her pocket. She rocks back and forth on her feet and looks around the art studio again, like anyone is standing there. No one is standing there. Helena is sitting there, but no one ever looks at the ground – especially not this girl, who spends her life looking at the sky.

She doesn’t see anyone. She sighs through her nose, grabs a paintbrush, flips it in a familiar way between her knuckles. Helena watches her mouth _pretty_ one more time, and – and smile around the word, soft like sky. Pretty. She dips the brush in paint. She puts it to the canvas again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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